She Had The Apartment, The Car And The Career. Then One Question Undid It All

By most measures, Sandra Lavie Gojkovic had already made it. Swiss-educated, with a well-paying corporate career in Dubai, she had the apartment, the car and the frequent-flyer miles that come with financial success.

None of it settled a question that kept surfacing between meetings and airport lounges: ‘Why had I been given so much while so many others had so little?’ Fifteen years ago she acted on it, resigning from her job and boarding a one-way flight to India with two shirts, two pairs of trousers and no fixed itinerary.

The trip that followed was solitary and largely improvised — long train journeys across an unfamiliar country, with none of the comforts she had left behind. ‘India was a culture shock, but it also gave me exactly what I had been searching for: simplicity, purpose and perspective,’ she has said.

She hadn’t originally planned to start her own organisation. The plan was to fund existing ones. It was only after watching some of that work fall apart to mismanagement that she decided to build something herself — smaller, transparent, and built around what people on the ground actually asked for rather than what looked good from the outside.

The search for the right place led her across a two-and-a-half-hour train ride and an hour-long boat crossing to Sagar Island, a remote stretch of West Bengal home to the ashram of Kapila Muni. Before building anything, she sat with residents of three villages there to understand what was actually needed.

Winning the trust of families wasn’t instant. She went from door to door, asking parents directly to send their children to a school she was starting from nothing. Today that school educates 150 children free of charge across five classes, another 120 children receive tuition support and daily meals through the programme, and 20 women have completed sewing training aimed at financial independence.

Fifteen years on, she says she measures success differently now — not in promotions or pay cheques, but in classrooms and the women learning new skills around her. ‘True purpose comes from serving others, creating opportunities, and standing beside those who have been denied them,’ she has said.

Wikimedia Commons/by Mettle30